Thirty years ago this month, the movie version of Tom Clancy’s 1989 novel Clear and Present Danger sailed into theaters with Harrison Ford as the author’s iconic hero, Jack Ryan. Ford had previously taken over the role from Alec Baldwin for 1992’s Patriot Games, but Clear and Present Danger marked his final appearance as Ryan. In the three decades since this film’s release, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine have played Ryan on the big screen, while John Krasinski headlined Amazon Prime Video’s Jack Ryan series.
Clear and Present Danger isn’t often mentioned today, even though Ford was one of the top action heroes of his era and is still active in making high-profile movies like last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Does Clear and Present Danger hold up to scrutiny 30 years later? And is Jack Ryan one of the best roles of Ford’s career, worthy of the massive amounts of attention that his work as Han Solo or Indy gets? It’s time to take a look back and find out.
Clear and Present Danger’s story was ahead of its time
Although the Iran-Contra affair was still a recent event when Clancy published Clear and Present Danger, the book still seemed to be ahead of the curve. By that time, the Cold War was winding down and the government was refocusing on the Drug War.
Clancy’s premise of the U.S. government funding a shadow war against a cartel was all too believable against this backdrop. It also seems to predict the way that the government attempted to downplay or deny misconduct from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq a decade after the movie came out.
Harrison Ford was still a top draw
Readers of the original novel can attest that the script was reworked to give Ford’s Jack Ryan a bigger role to play. And more asses to kick. It would be an exaggeration to call this one of Ford’s most popular action movies. But 1990s audiences loved seeing Ford play the hits, which is why the film made $215 million worldwide. That was lot of money for 1994!
Even now that Clear and Present Danger is decades old, Ford is still the top attraction for this movie. The assassination attempt on Ryan is also one of the best parts of the movie, and it just wouldn’t be the same without the actor. Ford put his stamp on Jack Ryan, one that other actors like Affleck and Pine just couldn’t do.
The supporting cast is stellar … but doesn’t get much to do
In 2024, a film that had Willem Dafoe, James Earl Jones, Benjamin Bratt, and Anne Archer backing up Ford would be considered an all-star cast. It was just as loaded in 1994 when Clear and Present Danger came out. But aside from Dafoe’s heroic turn as John Clark, most of the big-name supporting cast members don’t get much to do. Jones’ Admiral James Greer is only there to suffer from cancer and (spoiler alert!) ultimately die from it, while Archer barely gets any scenes with Ford.
Harris Yulin (Ghostbusters II) and Henry Czerny (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning) are both perfectly underhanded as James Cutter and Robert Ritter, two of the U.S. officials behind the war against the drug cartel who barely think twice about betraying their country’s soldiers in the name of keeping the scandal quiet. But neither the characters, nor the actors behind them, got a chance to further explore their motivations
The pacing moves very slowly compared to modern films
Times change, and this is true of the way films are edited as well. But from a modern perspective, Clear and Present Danger moves at glacial pace compared to more recent political action thrillers.
At the time, this may not have been an issue to moviegoers, but it’s something that’s very noticeable during a rewatch. It’s only two hours and 21 minutes long, but it somehow feels longer. An overlong drama is bad enough, but a slow-moving action movie feels lethal.
The movie removes a lot of the novel’s moral ambiguity
It could be argued that nuance doesn’t play very well in action movies, so Clear and Present Danger the film doesn’t seem to have the same moral ambiguity of the novel. Jack Ryan is even more virtuous in the movie than he is in the book, and he won’t be a party to a cover-up.
In the book, Ryan reports what happened to Congress and allows the president to throw the election as penance for his actions and to protect the people who were involved with the covert war. Even Ryan acknowledges that took honor and dignity in the book. That’s absent from the film and make Ryan’s predicament more simplistic.
Clear and Present Danger goes for the Hollywood ending
In one of the more inexplicable changes from book to film, Ford’s Jack Ryan actually teams up with drug lord Ernesto Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval) to confront their mutual enemy, Félix Cortez (Joaquim de Almeida). This gives the film one last action sequence for Ford, although the death of the main villain falls to another character.
The ending of the novel is superior because it not only avoids the tacked-on action sequence, but it gives Escobedo and Cortez even more poetic fates. That may have lacked the bombastic qualities of Hollywood’s take, but it would have been a better ending for the film.
Three decades later, Clear and Present Danger doesn’t hold up as well as some of the actor’s other classics like Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Witness. But if you want to see Harrison Ford doing Harrison Ford things in his prime, then this movie is for you.
Watch Clear and Present Danger on Max.
